rational (human) beings
The nature of man According to the common definition of the School, Man is a rational animal. This signifies no more than that, in the system of classification and definition shown in the Arbor Porphyriana, man is a substance, corporeal, living, sentient, and rational. It is a logical definition, having reference to a metaphysical entity. It has been said that man's animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though they are inseparably joined, during life, in one common personality. "Animality" is an abstraction as is "rationality". As such, neither has any substantial existence of its own. To be exact we should have to write: "Man's animality is rational"; for his "rationality" is certainly not something superadded to his "animality". Man is one in essence. In the Scholastic synthesis, it is a manifest illogism to hypostasize the abstract conceptions that are necessary for the intelligent apprehension of complete phenomena. A similar confusion of expression may be noticed in the statement that man is a "compound of body and soul". This is misleading. Man is not a body plus a soul — which would make of him two individuals; but a body that is what it is (namely, a human body) by reason of its union with the soul. As a special application of the general doctrine of matter and form which is as well a theory of science as of intrinsic causality, the "soul" is envisaged as the substantial form of the matter which, so informed, is a human "body". The union between the two is a "substantial" one. It cannot be maintained, in the Thomistic system, that the "substantial union is a relation by which two substances are so disposed that they form one". In the general theory, neither "matter" nor "form", but only the composite, is a substance. In the case of man, though the "soul" be proved a reality capable of separate existence, the "body" can in no sense be called a substance in its own right. It exists only as determined by a form; and if that form is not a human soul, then the "body" is not a human body. It is in this sense that the Scholastic phrase "incomplete substance", applied to body and soul alike, is to be understood. Though strictly speaking self-contradictory, the phrase expresses in a convenient form the abiding reciprocity of relation between these two "principles of substantial being". Man is an individual, a single substance resultant from the determination of matter by a human form. Being capable of reasoning, he verifies the philosophical definition of a person: "the individual substance of a rational nature". This doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas (cf. I.75.4) and of Aristotle is not the only one that has been advanced. In Greek and in modern philosophy, as well as during the Patristic and Scholastic periods, another celebrated theory laid claim to pre-eminence. For Plato the soul is a spirit that uses the body. It is in a non-natural state of union, and longs to be freed from its bodily prison (cf. Republic, X, 611). Plato has recourse to a theory of a triple soul to explain the union—a theory that would seem to make personality altogether impossible (see MATTER). St. Augustine, following him (except as to the triple-soul theory) makes the "body" and "soul" two substances; and man "a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body" (De Moribus, I, xxvii). But he is careful to note that by union with the body it constitutes the human being. St. Augustine's psychological doctrine was current in the Middle Ages up to the time and during the perfecting of the Thomistic synthesis. It is expressed in the "Liber de Spiritu et Anima" of Alcher of Clairvaux (?) (twelfth century). In this work "the soul rules the body; its union with the body is a friendly union, though the latter impedes the full and free exercise of its activity; it is devoted to its prison" (cf. de Wulf, "History of Philosophy", tr. Coffey). As further instances of Augustinian influence may be cited Alanus ab Insulis (but the soul is united by a spiritus physicus to the body); Alexander of Hales (union ad modum formæ cum materia); St. Bonaventure (the body united to a soul consisting of "form" and "spiritual matter"--forma completiva). Many of the Franciscan doctors seem, by inference if not explicitly, to lean to the Platonic Augustinian view; Scotus, who, however, by the subtlety of his "formal distinction a parte rei", saves the unity of the individual while admitting the forma corporeitatis; his opponent John Peter Olivi's "mode of union" of soul and body was condemned at the Council of Vienne (1311-12). The theories of the nature of man so far noticed are purely philosophical. No one of them has been explicitly condemned by the Church. The ecclesiastical definitions have reference merely to the "union" of "body" and "soul". With the exception of the words of the Council of Toledo, 688 (Ex libro responionis Juliani Archiep. Tolet.), in which "soul" and "body" are referred to as two "substances" (explicable in the light of subsequent definitions only in the hypothesis of abstraction, and as "incomplete" substances), other pronouncements of the Church merely reiterate the doctrine maintained in the School. Thus Lateran in 649 (against the Monothelites), canon ii, "the Word of God with the flesh assumed by Him and animated with an intellectual principle shall come . . ."; Vienne, 1311-12, "whoever shall hereafter dare to assert, maintain, or pertinaciously hold that the rational or intellectual soul is not per se and essentially the form of the human body, is to be regarded as a heretic"; Decree of Leo X, in V Lateran, Bull "Apostolici Regiminis", 1513, ". . . with the approval of this sacred council we condemn all who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal or is the same in all men . . . for the soul is not only really and essentially the form of the human body, but is also immortal; and the number of souls has been and is to be multiplied according as the number of bodies is multiplied"; Brief "Eximiam tuam" of Pius IX to Cardinal de Geissel, 15 June, 1857, condemning the error of Günther, says: "the rational soul is per se the true and immediate form of the body". In the sixteenth century Descartes advanced a doctrine that again separated soul and body, and compromised the unity of consciousness and personality. To account for the interaction of the two substances—the one "thought", the other "extension"— "Occasionalism" (Malebranche, Geulincx), "Pre-established Harmony" (Leibniz), and "Reciprocal Influx" (Locke) were imagined. The inevitable reaction from the Cartesian division is to be found in the Monism of Spinoza. Aquinas avoids the difficulties and contradictions of the "two substance" theory and, saving the personality, accounts for the observed facts of the unity of consciousness. His doctrine:
- disproves the possibility of metempsychosis;
- establishes an inferential, though not an apodictic argument, for the resurrection of the body;
- avoids all difficulties as to the "seat of the soul", by asserting formal actuation;
- proves the immortality of the soul from the spiritual and incomplex activity observed in the individual man; it is not my soul that thinks, or my body that eats, but "I" that do both.
Decalog (basis of all social justice)
declaration of independence (natural law provision of the USa)
Supreme Court (United states law)
code of canon law (Christian law)
declaration on human rights (international law)
consititutions of the united states
teaching on the decalog (christian tradition)
- Article 1. The First Commandment
- I. "You Shall Worship the Lord Your God and Him Only Shall You Serve"
- II. "Him Only Shall You Serve"
- III. "You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me"
- IV. "You Shall Not Make for Yourself a Graven Image . . ."
- In Brief
- Article 2. The Second Commandment
- I. The Name of the Lord Is Holy
- II. Taking the Name of the Lord in Vain
- III. The Christian Name
- In Brief
- Article 3. The Third Commandment
- I. The Sabbath Day
- II. The Lord's Day
- In Brief
- Chapter Two. "You Shall Love Your Neighbor As Yourself"
- Article 4. The Fourth Commandment
- I. The Family in God's Plan
- II. The Family and Society
- III. The Duties of Family Members
- IV. The Family and the Kingdom
- V. The Authorities in Civil Society
- In Brief
- Article 5. The Fifth Commandment
- I. Respect for Human Life
- II. Respect for the Dignity of Persons
- III. Safeguarding Peace
- In Brief
- Article 6. The Sixth Commandment
- I. "Male and Female He Created Them . . ."
- II. The Vocation to Chastity
- III. The Love of Husband and Wife
- IV. Offenses Against the Dignity of Marriage
- In Brief
- Article 7. The Seventh Commandment
- I. The Universal Destination and the Private Ownership of Goods
- II. Respect for Persons and Their Goods
- III. The Social Doctrine of the Church
- IV. Economic Activity and Social Justice
- V. Justice and Solidarity Among Nations
- VI. Love for the Poor
- In Brief
- Article 8. The Eighth Commandment
- I. Living in the Truth
- II. To Bear Witness to the Truth
- III. Offenses Against Truth
- IV. Respect for the Truth
- V. The Use of the Social Communications Media
- VI. Truth, Beauty, and Sacred Art
- In Brief
- Article 9. The Ninth Commandment
- I. Purification of the Heart
- II. The Battle for Purity
- In Brief
- Article 10. The Tenth Commandment
- I. The Disorder of Covetous Desires
- II. The Desires of the Spirit
- III. Poverty of Heart
- IV. "I Want to See God"
- In Brief
united states statues (federal)
statutes by state (US)
american authors on religious liberty and freedom
john courtney murray http://www.ts.mu.edu/readers/content/pdf/25/25.4/25.4.1.pdf